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Reference eBooks

If you like Reference eBooks, then you'll love these top picks.
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  • Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members

    by Ray Padgett ...
    Collecting over 40 original, in-depth interviews, Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members is the first look at Bob Dylan's career entirely from the perspective of the musicians standing a few feet away from him on stage – from his earliest days in the '60s all the way through the 21st century Never Ending Tour. With a few exceptions, these artists are not household names, but ... Read more

    $9.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • Ocean of Sound

    Ambient sound and radical listening in the age of communication

    by David Toop ...
    David Toop's extraordinary work of sonic history travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to the megalopolis of Tokyo via the work of artists as diverse as Brian Eno, Sun Ra, Erik Satie, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk and Brian Wilson.Beginning in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed, Ocean of Sound channels the competing instincts of 20th century music into an ... Read more

    $9.99 USD

  • Inflamed Invisible

    Collected Writings on Art and Sound, 1976-2018

    by David Toop ...
    Series Book 2 - Goldsmiths Press / Sonics Series
    A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and sound.In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new ... Read more

    $18.99 USD

  • Goth

    A History

    by Lol Tolhurst ...
    The co-founder of The Cure and author of Cured delivers a fascinating deep dive into the dark romanticism of Goth music, a misunderstood genre and culture.GOTH is an entertaining and engaging historical memoir, and a journey through Goth music and culture, exploring creative giants like The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and many more great bands that offered a place of ... Read more

    $15.99 USD

  • Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.

    A Memoir

    by Viv Albertine ...
    A feminist musician icon, Viv Albertine reveals the rocking, uncompromising story of her life on the front lines at the birth of the British punk movement and beyond in this exciting, humorous, and inspiring memoir.Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 YearsViv Albertine is a pioneer. As lead guitarist and songwriter for the seminal band The Slits, she ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • Man in the Music

    The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson

    by Joseph Vogel ...
    For half a century, Michael Jackson’s music has been an indelible part of our cultural consciousness. Landmark albums such as Off the Wall and Thriller shattered records, broke racial barriers, amassed awards, and set a new standard for popular music. While his songs continue to be played in nearly every corner of the world, however, they have rarely been given serious critical attention. The ... Read more

    $9.99 USD

  • Sonic Overload

    Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR

    Sonic Overload offers a new, music-centered cultural history of the late Soviet Union. It focuses on polystylism in music as a response to the information overload swamping listeners in the Soviet Union during its final decades. It traces the ways in which leading composers Alfred Schnittke and Valentin Silvestrov initially embraced popular sources before ultimately rejecting them. Polystylism ... Read more

    $107.99 USD

  • The Billboard Guide to Writing and Producing Songs that Sell

    How to Create Hits in Today's Music Industry

    by Eric Beall ...
    The Billboard Guide to Writing and Producing Songs that Sell unveils the secrets to climbing the charts and reaching success in today’s ultracompetitive music industry. Eric Beall supplies his firsthand knowledge of today’s record business, as well as interviews with successful writers, producers, and executives from the worlds of pop, hip-hop, country, adult contemporary, and R&B. The result: a ... Read more

    $13.99 USD $11.99 USD

  • Poseur

    A Memoir of Downtown New York City in the '90s

    by Marc Spitz ...
    Marc Spitz assumed that if he lived like his literary and rock 'n' roll heroes, he would become a great artist, too. He conveniently overlooked the fact that many of them died young, broke, and miserable. In his candid, wistful, touching, and hilarious memoir, Poseur, the music journalist, playwright, author, and blogger recounts his misspent years as a suburban kid searching for authenticity, ... Read more

    $7.99 USD $1.99 USD

  • Clapton's Guitar

    Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument

    New York Times bestselling author Allen St. John started off looking for the world’s greatest guitar, but what he found instead was the world’s greatest guitar builder.Living and working in Rugby, Virginia (population 7), retired rural mail carrier Wayne Henderson is a true American original, making America's finest instruments using little more than a pile of good wood and a sharp whittling knife ... Read more

    $14.99 USD

  • Last Train to Memphis

    The Rise of Elvis Presley

    Written with grace, humor, and affection, Last Train to Memphis has been hailed as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley. It is the first to set aside the myths and focus on Elvis' humanity in a way that has yet to be duplicated.A New York Times Notable BookWinner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award"Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe. This book cancels out all oth... ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Nothin' But a Good Time

    The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Glam Metal

    by Justin Quirk ...
    From 1983 until 1991, Glam Metal was the sound of American culture. Big hair, massive amplifiers, drugs, alcohol, piles of money and life-threatening pyrotechnics. This was the world stalked by Bon Jovi, Kiss, W.A.S.P., Skid Row, Dokken, Motley Crue, Cinderella, Ratt and many more. Armed with hairspray, spandex and strangely shaped guitars, they marked the last great era of supersize bands.Where ... Read more

    $8.99 USD

  • Perpetual Conversion

    30 Years & Counting in the Life of Metal Veteran Dan Lilker

    by Dave Hofer ...
    Perpetual Conversion traces the career of bassist Dan Lilker from 1981, the year he co-founded Anthrax, through 2011, and details numerous influential bands he founded or joined, including the groundbreaking Stormtroopers of Death (S.O.D.), thrash legends Nuclear Assault, grindcore trailblazers Brutal Truth, and one of the earliest US black metal bands, Hemlock.Although known among die-hard, ... Read more

    $18.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • The Flatlanders

    Now It's Now Again

    by John T. Davis ...
    Series series American Music Series
    “Conservative West Texas spawns radical creativity and lifelong bonds of friendship in this story of an unlikely band” from the renowned music journalist (Kirkus Reviews).A group of three friends who made music in a house in Lubbock, Texas, recorded an album that wasn’t released and went their separate ways into solo careers. That group became a legend and then—twenty years later—a band. The ... Read more

    $14.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • From the Velvets to the Voidoids

    The Birth of American Punk Rock

    Exhaustively researched and packed with unique insights, this history journeys from the punk scene's roots in the mid-1960s to the arrival of "new wave" in the early 1980s. With a cast that includes Patti Smith, Pere Ubu, Television, Blondie, the Ramones, the MC5, the Stooges, Talking Heads, and the Dead Boys, this account is the definitive story of early American punk rock. Extraordinarily ... Read more

    $11.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story

    ‘A triumph’ - Time OutTransformer is the only complete and comprehensive telling of the Lou Reed story.Legendary songwriter and guitarist Lou Reed passed away on the 27th October 2013, but his musical influence is assured. Now discover the true story of the Velvet Underground pioneer in this update of Bockris’s classic biography.Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story follows the great songwriter ... Read more

    $8.99 USD

  • Ornette Coleman

    The Territory and the Adventure

    by Maria Golia ...
    With striking photographs and personal insight, a compelling biography of the great American saxophonist and free jazz innovator Ornette Coleman.Ornette Coleman’s career encompassed the glory years of jazz and the American avant-garde. Born in segregated Fort Worth, Texas, during the Great Depression, the African-American composer and musician was zeitgeist incarnate. Steeped in the Texas blues ... Read more

    $19.99 USD

  • A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers

    Will Friedwald’s illuminating, opinionated essays—provocative, funny, and personal—on the lives and careers of more than three hundred singers anatomize the work of the most important jazz and popular performers of the twentieth century. From giants like Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland to lesser-known artists like Jeri Southern and Joe Mooney, they have created a ... Read more

    $24.99 USD

  • Sellout

    The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994–2007)

    by Dan Ozzi ...
    NATIONAL BESTSELLERAN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR"Ozzi's reporting is strong, balanced and well told...a worthy successor to its obvious inspiration, Michael Azerrad's 2001 examination of the '80s indie underground, 'Our Band Could Be Your Life.'"--New York Times Book ReviewA raucous history of punk, emo, and hardcore’s growing pains during the commercial boom of the early 90s and mid-aughts, ... Read more

    $15.99 USD

  • Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music

    **A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it.**In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But ... Read more

    $18.99 USD

  • Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth

    Series series 33 1/3
    Welsh post-punk band Young Marble Giants released one LP in 1980 and then, like their vanishing portraits on the album's cover, disappeared. Even though Colossal Youth received positive reviews and sold surprisingly well, Young Marble Giants quickly slid into the margins of rock 'n' roll history-relegated to cult status among post-punk and indie rock fans. Their lasting appeal owes itself to the ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • The Vinyl Frontier

    The Story of NASA’s Interstellar Mixtape

    'Bursts with gloriously geeky detail.' The TelegraphHave you ever made someone you love a mix-tape?Forty years ago, a group of scientists, artists and writers gathered in a house in Ithaca, New York to work on the most important compilation ever conceived. It wasn't from one person to another, it was from Earth to the Cosmos.In 1977 NASA sent Voyager 1 and 2 on a Grand Tour of the outer planets. ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Duran Duran's Rio

    by Annie Zaleski ...
    Series series 33 1/3
    In the '80s, the Birmingham, England, band Duran Duran became closely associated with new wave, an idiosyncratic genre that dominated the decade's music and culture. No album represented this rip-it-up-and-start-again movement better than the act's breakthrough 1982 LP, Rio. A cohesive album with a retro-futuristic sound-influences include danceable disco, tangy funk, swaggering glam, and Roxy ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • David Bowie Made Me Gay

    100 Years of LGBT Music

    LGBT musicians have shaped the development of music over the last century, with a sexually progressive soundtrack in the background of the gay community’s struggle for acceptance. With the advent of recording technology, LGBT messages were for the first time brought to the forefront of popular music. David Bowie Made Me Gay is the first book to cover the breadth of history of recorded music by and ... Read more

    $12.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus